It was standing, gaping, skipping, wandering, and strolling-room-only last Monday at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ free day. OVER FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE had come through the gates by 4 p.m. (I still got a parking place in the new garage at 1. Pretty cool.)

I was stunned by two things: How many people brought their children; and how awed many of those kids were. One nine-year-old asked a volunteer coordinator, “Where are the pollinators in the Conservatory?” — a great question because there was much in the Conservatory that’s burst into bloom, including this incredible thing called a clock vine, (Thunbergia mysorensis, to you botanists, and you know who you are) which drapes golden, purple-throated orchid-like blossoms down on gossamer stalks to gape right in your face as you walk under a trellis. The answer is that many of the pollinators are ants. And they’re in the Conservatory — you just have to slow down and stay put to watch for them. Staying put, of course, is not something you can try in the midst of a shoulder-to-shoulder free-day crowd, but I’ll try it on another visit.

Another pair of kids, a brother and sister who couldn’t have been long out of kindergarten, stood in awe in front of a five-foot-tall tree yucca. “Wow, Mom, it’s huge,” one said. And then they directed Mom to take a picture — without them even in it.

It’s not that brilliant, Colorado sunshine bouncing off of snow isn’t gorgeous, but if you’re like me, you’re ready to contemplate something different, and I don’t mean the snow mold that turf types are worried is burgeoning beneath those brilliant banks of white.

I mean something like this.

Rosa glauca. If you had this big, beautiful rose, right now its red branches and stunning rose hips would be showing up against those white snowbanks. You’d be looking forward to its pink and white blooms and deep-purple foliage.

Glauca is one of the seven plants that Plant Select, a collaboration between the Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado State University and the green industry in Colorado, chose for its 2010 introductions. They do this every year, and every year I feel like Steven Martin in that old comedy sketch, yelling, “The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” I can’t wait in January to see just what they’ve picked. This year there are some old standbys, plants that people in Colorado know about and grow, but that were little known beyond the Front Range.

Before the plants dragged me away from my formerly content life, I thought of gardening as a solitary occupation. It’s really anything but. Gardeners are as social as any other large group of people, varying along the same spectrum of introversion and extroversion. But as Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator at the Denver Botanic Gardens puts it, “I’ve never met a MEAN gardener.” Opinionated, yes, territorial, yes, curmudgeonly, chaotic (guilty), obsessed (guilty times two) and idiotically optimistic (guilty to the umpteenth power), but mean? Nope. All the gardeners I’ve met have been positive, helpful, kind, generous, and laugh-until-your-lungs-hurt funny. After all, we play in the dirt.

That’s why one of the best gifts for gardeners is the chance to collude with more of their own kind, to get inspired, informed, awed and amused. Members of the Denver Botanic Gardens are admitted to the Gardens (and the Gardens at Chatfield free and get discounted tickets to events, 10 percent off at the gift store and plant sales and members-only shopping hours. Between all of the discounts and guest tickets, an individual membership more than pays for itself if you visit four times per year, just you yourself. Check out all that’s available at botanicgardens.org

This just in on a day with glowering skies and three days of snow/rain mix coming on: There’s now an iPhone app for gardeners.

Broomfield-based seed company Botanical Interests has put together an iPhone app ($5.99) that lists the company’s vegetable and herb seeds and compiles growing tips and invormation on them. The app will update with flower seeds sometime in 2010, and soon you’ll be able to order seeds through the application, says the company’s Internet marketing manager, Shayna Lashway. You can save information to a favorites list and organize searches based on, say, harvest times and lighting conditions. The app also has cultivation tips and you get a 5% discount on your first seed order (nice since it’s a relatively pricey app).

But wait, there’s more: Botanical Interests has collaborated with the Denver Botanic Gardens on a series of 16 seed varieties: an agastache, an allium, an artemisia, prairie aster, two echinaceas, a rudbeckia, a salvia, a verbena and more. The Garden’s senior curator, Panayoti Kelaidis, collaborated with the seed company on the plant selections. Many of the natives are threatened or endangered in parts of the U.S. There are plans at Botanical to collaborate with other U.S. botanic gardens on the seed selections.

If last spring’s mad planting rush is a blurry memory to you, Botanical is the company with the pretty botanical drawings on their seed packets whose racks you’ve likely seen at your seed store or even your health-food store. They’re family-founded and owned and sell non-GMO and certified organic varieties.

Despite that final feeling that always invades when I pull the last tomatoes in, the fat lady never really sings for a garden. Or rather, she sings, but then the soundtrack sort of plays in the background until spring, sometimes loud and rollicking, sometimes soft and slow and elegiac.

So you can’t quite face those fall garden cleanup chores yet, with this weekend’s deep freeze coming on? Just think of it as kale-sweetening weather. I like to grow kale, but cooking with it is a challenge. You’ve first got to rip it off those woody stems (I’ve found that doing just that, ripping with your hands, seems fastests) and then steam or blanch and then saute it. And this year, in my Soil Sisters garden at my best friend’s place, we grew several big dinosaur — a.k.a lacinato — kale plants. The challenge of unlocking kale’s nutrition doesn’t daunt cookbook author Terry Walters, though. Her <> “Clean Food” book, gorgeously designed and grouped into seasons, has an amazing buffet of vegetable dishes. (It’s the fat cookbook with the electric green cover that some Barnes and Noble stores were displaying last Monday for 30% off.) I’ll pop one of the easier recipes onto the end of this post.

Meanwhile, even if you don’t want to dig in the dirt this weekend in the cold — or you’re saving all your energy to cheer on the Rockies — there are plenty of reasons to not give up on your garden yet. Jeff Ashton, author of the now-out-of-print-but-still-useful-as-heck “The 12-Month Gardener,“ has some useful tips for fall and winter planting that I’ll share next week.

What’s shaking out there in the garden world? First, there are fall sales at your local garden shop. Look there first for bulbs, soil amendments, fall fertilizers for your lawn and perennials, and sales on gloves, tools, and perennials. Check out The Post’s 2008 perennial planting info before you go.

If you’d rather celebrate than shop, check out the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield’s Pumpkin Festival NEXT Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 17 and 18 (the corn maze will still be there this weekend, the 10-11, but the festival’s been moved). There’s a pumpkin patch with pumpkins for sale, a corn maze and lots of other family fun. The pumpkin patch alone is bigger than 8 acres; there’s hayrides and craft vendors, too, and costumed kids are admitted to the festival (though not the maze) free.

Meanwhile, up north at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, there’s a Halloween festival on Halloween Day, but also a buffet of classes most weekend days through October, including centerpieces this Saturday (10/10 and indoor succulents next Saturday (10/17). (You’ll need to download a .pdf file of the classes for more complete info, or subscribe to the garden’s emailed newsletter.

Here’s Terry Walters’ recipe for Kale with Caramelized Shallots (if you buy just one bunch of kale, this recipe is easily cut in half to serve 3 — or, well, one person if you chow down on greens like I do.)

In large skillet or Dutch oven over medium heat, saute shallots in 1 tablespoon olive oil for 6-8 minutes or until very soft and caramelized. [An interjection from Susan: Shallots go soft for me very quickly, so I plan to caramelize a whole bunch and freeze them.] Add lemon juice and saute another 2-3 minutes to brown. Remove from heat and set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to boil. cut and remove dired stem ends from kale and submerge whole leaes in boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until tender and bright gren. Remove from heat, drain and chop into bite-size pieces. Add kale to pan with shallots and saute one minute. Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil, season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

I’m counting myself lucky because Plant Select exec director Pat Hayward says they’re running out of copies at every event they take it to. ProGreen, the green industry’s big January conference, had sold out of 100 copies by the second day of the weeklong event.

“Fulcrum (the publisher) has been blown away by the response,” Pat told me over the phone. “Whenever there’s a speaker who brings copies with them, they sell out. I think it’s because it’s so beautiful.”

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Pat says it was book designer Ann W. Douden’s idea to intertwine the botanical drawings, generated by Denver Botanical Garden classes, into the wheelbarrow-loads of photographs of trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals chosen for their adaptibility in Colorado and other plains and intermountain landscapes. If you’re not familiar with Plant Select, a joint effort of Colorado State University, the Denver Botanic Gardens and area nurseries and plant experts, you can read more here.

The book happened “by committee” over four years, Pat says. From the beginning, there was a push to get photos of every plant, in all seasons, in and out of flower. “David Winger finally went out and shot a bunch last summer.” Other passionate gardeners donated photos to the effort. Editor James E. Heinrich, CSU prof James E. Klett and the Botanic Gardens’ Panayoti Kelaidis and Dan Johnson contributed introductory chapters. But the stars are the plants themselves, each of them profiled in a two-page spread with comments on use, propagation, range, origin, needs, and — gasp — disadvantages (that lovely, salmon-colored “Mesa Verde” ice plant, for example? not as xeric as the other ice plant cultivars). My favorite feature of the book is tucked on the lower left-hand corner of each spread — a little schematic that shows how big — or small — the plant is in comparison to a human.

“It’s supposed to be a whole palette,” Pat says of Plant Select’s picks. There’s even a food plant: a gooseberry that’s been proven hardy as far north and high up as Cheyenne, Wyoming.

“To see these plants become so mainstream, that are so perfect for here,” is what excites Pat about the book. Me, I just want to fall into the pictures. I’m sort of dismayed that it’s so gorgeous, because I know my copy will be well-thumbed and likely coffee-stained in no time.
And oh, yeah — I’ll probably get it dirty.

I promise, this is my last stump speech about winter watering. But if you’re panicking because of the three-month forecast for Colorado’s Front Range — which doesn’t see a significant snow dump outside of the mountains this spring — here are tips from Denver Botanic Gardens Horticulture Director Sarada Krishnan:

Trees and shrubs: Watch soil moisture, especially if they’re still getting established (first year for small shrubs, one year per trunk diameter for trees). Check the moisture 3 or 4 inches down into the soil. If it’s dry, give the area a slow, gentle soaking. Remember to disconnect the hose at night so pipes don’t freeze.Lawns: Don’t move up aeration and fertilization services. But you can call to book them for March or early April.Vegetables: Hold your horses for a few weeks even on cool-season crops like lettuce. (I’d add this caveat: unless you’ve got a cold frame and/or feel really, really lucky. If you get any to grow, you get bragging rights. I’m going to try it with some 45-day lettuce, in a brick south-facing planter, under permeable clear plastic. I’ll keep you posted.)Bulbs: If they’re blooming, enjoy them while they last. There’s nothing you can do to prolong the blossoms. But if yours are under mulch and not coming up yet, don’t panic. The mulch will keep them a bit cooler a bit longer.Don’t fire up the sprinkler system just yet. That would be asking for a surprise freeze or May blizzard.Still itching to garden? Sharpen tools, clean out leaves, tidy perennials, amend soil, add mulch.
And again, check out CSU extension’s winter-watering info on the web. <NO1.

On the up side, if do get out into this unseasonable sunshine to do those neglected fall cleanup chores, you’ll be getting more vitamin D, and that could mean no spring cold to keep you indoors. So says a study by Harvard and CU.

The tomato plants came from a retired couple that I met on my town’s bike trail. They have gotten to know me and my big husky over the years, and every year around this time, Lou comes through with a couple of tomato plants. Sometimes Brandywines, sometimes cherries, this year a couple of patios. They often come with a lovely note and they ALWAYS come with biscuits for the dogs. This year, this gift is extra sweet, because Lou and Buddy and I haven’t run into each other in months. Buddy has had some skin surgery that has kept him out of the sun and Lou has had surgery herself, and the last time we met on the bike trail, she said she hadn’t had time to seed any tomatoes. So I now have a burning need to get my own floppy seedlings securely potted in deeper containers so I can take a Brandywine over to Lou and Buddy.

Last year the gift tomatoes had to compete for space and light with the Zucchini That Ate St. Louis, so the yield was small, but oh, so delicious:

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Without much time to preserve or even consume this bounty, I made a very small batch of tomato jam (cinnamon, poblanos, a dash of brown sugar). As summer wore on, time became even shorter, and in September I started just smacking tomato halves drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with herbs onto a hot barbecue grill and then sliding them into freezer containers. That winter we had a lot of pizza parties, and we’d pile the tomatoes and some chevre and some basil on a pizza crust and call it dinner. And it was such a joy, such a gift, when my best friend made the happy-gourmet face over something I just pulled out of the freezer, something that came from my garden. But then, her husband had built me the gift of the raised beds in which I grew the tomatoes. My friend Julie helped me move the soil into them. My sister gave me the grill. And Bo the greedy biscuit-mooching husky secured for me the gift of Lou and Buddy’s friendship, which might not have happened if the dog did not have a steel-trap memory for anyone who has ever fed him or if Buddy didn’t have a soft spot for canine antics. Bo himself was a gift from my vet; my love of dogs, a gift from my parents. When I ponder all this I feel wrapped in a web of gifts as strong and eternal as the cycle from seed to plant to fruit to seed, blessed beyond belief.

And then I think, it’s time to pay the universe back a little.

Plant a Row for the Hungry does just that. It connects food gardeners, who often produce more than they can use or give away, with food banks in their communities. In case you’ve been living under a flower pot lately, it’s rough out there. People are losing jobs, losing homes, losing hope. Many food banks are seeing a 20 percent increase in community need — and a drop in donations or funding. That means they can’t help people who need it.

So let’s see, I can dedicate a row of peas and a row of chard, and … a fifth of whatever tomato/tomatillos get planted out. What are you willing to give? C’mon, Colorado, are you going to let ILLINOIS outshine you? Can you believe the pounds of produce those Cubs-loving flatlanders donated? (I have lots of relatives in the Land of Lincoln, including my Uncle Vernon, the heirloom tomato guru of Bloomington. And if you’re reading, Uncle V., yes, it’s a challenge.)

Tell me what you can give, and I’ll keep a virtual tally here on this blog. There’s not a lot we can do as individuals about food riots in Somalia, or the coming rice crisis in Myanmar. But we can do something about hunger where we live. We can get fresh produce to people who, without us, might have to make do on tinned tuna and canned soup in the midst of summer’s bounty. We can tell them, “you deserve better than that, no matter why you’re here.” We can share our gardens’ abundant gifts.

Tell me when you decide what you’re going to donate, how your garden’s producing and how many pounds you’ve got when you take it to your local food bank. To find out which institutions can accept fresh produce, ask your city administration; your church is another good source. Or start your own Plant a Row campaign if there isn’t yet one in your community.

Dirt Dates: The Denver Botanic Gardens is having its annual Plant Sale starting Friday, May 9, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.) and Saturday, May 10 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (members only 8:30-10 a.m.). Sayeth the Gardens: “The theme for the 2008 Sale is “Urban Nature” and will feature a variety of options on how to incorporate urban living into your own scenery, whether you have a small garden or no garden at all.” More deets here.

Next weekend, it’s Boulder County’s Ginormous Plant Sale, Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 8:30-4 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Iris in Boulder. The proceeds benefit Growing Gardens and the Master Gardener program of Boulder County. More here.

As you’re driving around this month, keep an eye out for smaller plant sales at community colleges and co-ops. Sometimes they’re not big or well-publicized; I stumbled on a tiny one just last weekend and vowed to return to nab some great-looking pepper plants in varieties I didn’t seed this year. If you buy veggies from nonprofits, then donate some of your harvest, you keep the wheel of gifts turning two ways.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.